she landed on the floor, her bathrobe coming open to reveal her naked body underneath.
He grabbed her by the arm and shoved her into the floor again.
“Don’t...” she begged, her voice breaking with tears. “I have children.”
“Are you offering them?” he asked, ripping the robe from her body and wrenching her to her feet.
“Please, don’t kill me. My husband’s an attorney. He has money—”
“Keep begging. It won’t work,” he said as he bent her over the bed and kicked at her ankles until she parted her shaking thighs. He pressed the barrel of the gun into her throat. “But I like how you do it.”
Tossing the gun aside, he opened his pants and slammed inside her. Her body clenched around him tighter with each thrust. Despite her pleas and her protests, she grew wetter the more he rammed into her, the harder he worked her. But he couldn’t come, not yet. Although he wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. Sex with Phoebe was business, not pleasure, and he hated the work.
As she moaned underneath him, crying against the intrusion, Kingsley closed his eyes and disappeared to another place, another time. The elegant and well-appointed bedroom he stood in disappeared and dissolved. The hunter-green walls and the modern art prints faded away and rough wood took their place. The king-size bed adorned with silk sheets and pillows was gone, and now a small cot sat on the floor near a fireplace. And Kingsley lay on his side facing the fire.
“You have a bruise on your neck under your ear,” Søren said, touching the sensitive spot with his fingertip. “It’ll go above your collar.”
“If someone says anything, I’ll tell them a tree hit me.”
Søren laughed softly and kissed the bruise.
“I don’t think they’ll believe a tree hit you. Maybe they’d believe you hit a tree.”
“Why would I hit a tree? A tree never did anything to me.”
“Perhaps it likes being hit.” Søren kissed Kingsley’s neck again, his shoulder, his throat.
Kingsley remembered this night. It had a been a Sunday. Everyone at their school went to bed early on Sunday nights. They’d woken early for Sunday Mass and had to wake early again for Monday morning classes. Once everyone had gone to bed, he and Søren had sneaked out to the hermitage to spend a few perfect hours alone together.
“Aren’t you worried someone will find out what we’re doing out here?” Kingsley asked as he covered Søren’s roving hand with his own.
“They’d never believe it even if we told them.”
“What? They’d believe I’d sleep with a teacher, but they wouldn’t believe you’d sleep with a student?” Kingsley tried to sound outraged. He wasn’t sure if he pulled it off or not.
“Precisely.”
“Because I’m a slut, and you’re perfect?”
“Because you have friends, and no one likes me,” Søren said.
Kingsley sat up and looked down at Søren.
“I like you,” Kingsley said.
“No, you don’t,” Søren said with a half smile. “You want me. There’s a difference.”
“You don’t like me, either,” Kingsley chided. He ignored the unwelcome pang of sympathy Søren’s placid “No one likes me” declaration gave him.
“It isn’t that I don’t like you,” Søren said with a playful sigh. “It’s only I like me so much more than I like you that, in comparison, it looks like I dislike you.”
“I might suffocate you tonight with a pillow,” Kingsley said.
“You’ll have to teach my French classes, then. Lesson plans in my desk.”
“Forget it. You get to live.”
“I thought as much.”
Kingsley collapsed on to Søren’s chest with a sigh. Søren lifted Kingsley’s hair and pressed a kiss under his ear.
“Well, I’m worried they’ll find out about us,” Kingsley said, turning on to his side away from Søren. Søren wasn’t deterred. He ran his hand down the center of Kingsley’s back and pressed a kiss to the top of his spine. Kingsley relished these moments, after the fire of Søren’s sadism had burned itself out. The gentle touches and kisses hurt almost more than the blows from the belt and the cane did. They hurt his heart, and yet he treasured the ache. It was his favorite pain.
“Why are you worried? We’re always careful. No one ever sees us together. I don’t care if they find out about me. I have places I can go. But I don’t want you...”
“Don’t want me what?” Kingsley asked.
“I don’t want to embarrass you,” Søren said, and Kingsley laughed out loud at the abject absurdity of that statement.
“You don’t want to embarrass me? An hour ago, you stripped me naked, told me to get on my knees and confess to you the most shameful sexual fantasies I’ve ever had in my life, and you say you don’t want to embarrass me?”
“That’s different. Who we are in private has nothing to do with who we have to be out there. Do you want people to know what you are?”
“Your lover?”
“Not that.”
Kingsley thought about the question. Alone with Søren he became a slave, a slut, a groveling nobody who submitted to sexual torture and said thank you for the privilege. Having sex with another boy didn’t embarrass him. It was everything else that did.
“Non, it’s true. I don’t want people to know I like being hurt. They wouldn’t understand it, and they wouldn’t understand you. They’d think you were a monster.”
“I am a monster,” Søren said as he bit the center of Kingsley’s back.
“Yes, but no one knows that but me. It’s our secret. But...” He sighed heavily and pressed his back against Søren’s chest. “I’m afraid they’ll find out soon enough anyway.”
“And why is that?” Søren demanded.
“Well, you see...” He braced himself for Søren’s wrath. “I’m pregnant.”
Kingsley bit his bottom lip to keep from laughing as Søren sighed so heavily with disgust the cot vibrated. Then Kingsley felt something in his back, something that felt like a foot.
That foot pushed, and Kingsley landed hard on the floor right on his ass.
“Oh, no,” he said as he hit the hardwood beneath him with bruising force. “I lost the baby.”
When he looked up over the edge of the mattress, he found Søren’s face buried in the pillow. He’d never seen Søren
